CHARLES CORREA (1930–2015)

Nida Najar reports in the New York Times that the Indian architect Charles Correa died last week in Mumbai. Dubbed “India’s greatest architect” by the Royal Institute of British Architects, Correa trained in the U.S. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology but returned to his native India to practice, there building museums, universities, and apartments. One of his most well-known, early buildings was a Mahatma Gandhi memorial museum at Gandhi’s ashram in Ahmedabad. Correa also designed the building housing the Permanent Mission of India to the United Nations in Manhattan.

Born in 1930 in the Indian city of Secunderabad, Correa studied at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and MIT before starting his own company in Mumbai in 1958, eleven years after the country’s independence from Britain. Correa also designed buildings outside India, including serving as one of several architects that that worked on an expansion at MIT completed in 2005. He held visiting professorships at MIT and Harvard, among other institutions.